New curriculum carries heavy price

Published 3:52 pm, Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Teachers, principals and municipal school superintendents must carry whiplash insurance. No sooner does one national or state mandate send them speeding down one road toward "reform" than another comes along to slam on the brakes and send them in another direction.

No Child Left Behind radically intensified the focus of public education on standardized testing. Race to the Top increased the government's ability to intervene in school systems and the movement toward charter schools. Gov. Dannel Malloy's reform package is closely aligned with Race to the Top and will require districts to alter the way they evaluate teachers. Now Connecticut is one of five states that will experiment with longer school days, and educators are scrambling to get ready for the coming of the Common Core Standards.

Each of these initiatives made educators at the local level change the way they do things. Common Core will do the same, potentially to a greater degree than the others, as it will require all school systems to teach the same material in math and English. National standardized testing on the material begins in 2015.

The encouraging news is that many educators, some of whom resisted other reforms, are enthusiastic about the Common Core, asserting that it will push students academically, and provide educators a base from which to expand. We hope that is the case, and that it does not in fact tighten the grip of standardized testing, which has squeezed much of the life out of public education over the past decade.

But a definite threat the Common Core poses is an immense financial burden on school systems that are already strapped by years of incremental-growth budgets in a bad economy.

Because Common Core will focus not just on outcomes, meaning test scores, but what is actually taught inside classrooms, it will require many school systems to replace much of the teaching material, including textbooks, that they already use.

The CTMirror reports that the initiative could cost municipalities millions, saying the state Department of Education has proposed that state government spend $18 million over two years to help pay for implementation, though the actual price statewide could be much greater. Given that the governor already is proposing big cuts to close a budget gap, towns and cities should not count on much help.

It would be wrong for the federal government at this time to force an enormous unfunded mandate on public schools. If the federal government wants a Common Core, it should pay for it.